Newegg.com has launched a deal on select AMD Radeon HD 7000 series graphics card that allow you to save up to US $90 confirming the recent price drop that we have seen all across Europe.

The deal puts the Powercolor PCS+ AX7950 HD 7950 down to US $179.99 after US $30 rebate and with free shipping as well as MSI Radeon HD 7950 that can be bought for as low US $179.99 after $25 rebate. The cheapest HD 7970 graphics card comes from Sapphire and can be had for as low as US $279.99 after a US $20 rebate and with free shipping, while XFX has the cheapest HD 7970 GHz Edition for as low as US $319.99 after a US $30 rebate.

Retailers/e-tailers wants to clear the stock of AMD's Tahiti based HD 7970 and HD 7950 graphics cards as we will soon see some new versions based on the same chips, as well as some all-new graphics cards based on hot Volcanic Islands GPU.

There have already been a couple of rumors regarding yet another GPU from AMD based on the 28nm Tahiti chip, and according to Expreview.com, it appears that AMD will indeed push this GPU in the Radeon HD 7800 series rather than the Radeon HD 7900 series.

AMD plans to brand the SKU as the Radeon HD 7890. Unfortunately, there are still no precise details regarding the clock speeds or any precise specifications for that matter, but Expreview noted that it should end up around 15 percent faster than the Geforce GTX 660 graphics card. Of course, the new AMD Radeon HD 7890 SKU aims the GTX 660 as its primary competition as it should hit the marker with a similar price tag.

The new SKU is specifically aimed at the upcoming Christmas shopping spree and should fill the gap that AMD currently has in that price range.

According to a rumor over at HT4U.net, AMD is apparently working on yet another Tahiti GPU, the Tahiti-LE.

The new GPU could help AMD fill a hole between the HD 7950 and HD 7870, thus putting much more pressure on Nvidia's GTX 660 Ti graphics card. According to the post over at HT4U.net, AMD apparently is looking to place the new GPU in the HD 7800 series rather than the HD 7900 series which is already crowded with five models.

Although there are still no precise details regarding the new GPU, AMD has enough room cut the Tahiti GPU down, most probably down to 1535 stream processors and even play with the memory interface. The new SKU, based on the Tahiti-LE GPU will most likely be ready by the Christmas shopping season.

Following the loss versus the GTX 680, AMD used its Radeon HD 7970 Gigaherz Edition to set some new performance records, but the speed increase brought about a noise increase as well. Club 3D is among the few AMD partners who took it upon themselves to fix what may be the HD 7970’s biggest downside – the overly loud fan. The new HD 7970 royalAce features Club 3D's CoolStream dual-slot cooler with two fans and three heatpipes that promises lower temperatures and lower noise when compared to the reference HD 7970 GHz Edition graphics card.

Based on AMD's HD 7970 GHz Edition, or Tahiti XT2 GPU with 2048 stream processors, the Club 3D HD 7970 royalAce has been set to work at 1050MHz for the base and 1100MHz for boost GPU clock with 3072MB of GDDR5 memory clocked at 6000MHz and paired up with a 384-bit memory interface.

Club 3D’s packaging is miniature yet tough enough and also has plenty of info on it. Of course, the emphasis is on the GHz Edition of AMD’s HD 7970 but the fact that it’s a special Club 3D RoyalAce SuperOverClock version wasn’t ignored either.

The box holds the graphics card, driver CD and a CrossFire connector. Similarly to what we’ve seen from XFX in these past years, Club3D decided to bundle a knob hanger saying “Do Not Disturb, Gaming in Progress”, for gamers who don’t like interruptions.

HD 7970 royalAce graphics card is special for its cooler, which is based on Cool Stream technology. Unlike reference cooling, where the fan is located towards the end of the card and blows through the card, Club3D opted for two fans that push air downwards, straight at the heatsink. As a result, some of the heat may be released inside the case so you might want to make sure your in-case airflow is adequate.

Both fans are connected to the same 4-pin power connector and the RPM can be regulated in Catalyst Control Centre.

The company used thick heatpipes that transfer heat to the farthest parts of the heatsink with ease. Due to the tall heatpipes, and the way they’re bent, the cooler is a few centimeters taller than the standard cooler. Still, although it exceeds the height of the PCB, even the most traditional of cases shouldn’t have problems fitting it inside. You can get a better idea of how tall they are when the card is viewed from the back.

Just like the reference card, the card uses one 6-pin and one 8-pin power connector.

Three heatpipes go through the cooler but Club 3D made sure they’re bent in a way so as to provide five contact points.

You can see where the GPU touches the base, as well as the fact that the HD 7970’s GPU is rotated by 45 degrees. The cooler is held in place with four screws only, but we didn’t notice any instability or vibration.

The card has 3GB of Hynix memory, which we’ve grown accustomed to seeing on pretty much hall AMD and Nvidia cards. The memory is rated at 1500MHz and this card is no exception.

The I/O panel has one dual-link DVI, standard HDMI out and two mini DisplayPort outs.

HD 7970 royalAce comes with two CrossFire connectors, meaning that it’s possible to daisy chain up to four cards for some fierce CrossFireX muscle. Although the shroud hides the CrossFire connectors, it will not be a problem as CrossFire bridge connectors are flexible.

The Club 3D Radeon HD 7970 royalAce comes with a toggle switch. This switch allows you to switch between two separate BIOS versions, 1) factory defaults and 2) unprotected. The graphics card comes standard at 1050 MHz GPU clock speed with overclocking headroom up to 1.1GHz and beyond.

Overclocking the core by additional 110MHz was a pretty nice result, seeing as how the card already runs 50MHz faster than the reference 1GHz. After our overclock, GPU Boost clock was 1210MHz. We squeezed out another 80MHz from the memory (240MHz effectively). We left the fans in AUTO mode – there was no need to speed them up manually since the temperatures went up to 78°C after our overclock. We’ll discuss thermals in more detail next.

Thermals and Noise

Thanks to the CoolStream technology, which involves a large heatsink, two fans and specially bent heatpipes, Club3D’s solution outperforms the reference one. The feat is all the more impressive considering we’re talking about a factory overclocked GPU here .

When idle, the GPU was around 39°C and the fans were quiet. After longer gaming sessions, temperatures climbed up to 76°C. When the card got hot, we could hear the fans easily (they ran at about 2900RPM), but they were still music to our ears compared to the overly loud reference solution.

We had to remove the thermal paste that was on the base of the cooler, because it seems that the screws were a bit loose, which caused the paste to harden. Our first attempt at testing resulted in temperatures over 90°C, which was a clear indicator that something went wrong somewhere. Luckily, we fixed it and the cooler started showing its real face. We had no need for manual RPM settings, not even after overclocking, because auto-regulation ran just fine and temperature never exceeded 78°C. Our additional overclock made the fans louder, but not to the point where we’d call them too loud.

Power Consumption

AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition can draw significantly more power than the initially launched HD 7970 cards, which run at 925MHz.

Club3D launched three cards in its HD 7970 Poker series – royalAce is the fastest (1050MHz GPU), followed by royalKing (975MHz GPU) while the slowest in the series is the royalQueen (925MHz GPU). All the cards are special for the dual-fan cooling, which performed well on our tests.

Club3D produced an ace from its sleeve when it decided to strap the HD 7970 with special cooling, especially in the case of its highly overclocked HD 7970 royalAce SuperOverClock card. The cooler isn’t as quiet as the GTX 680’s, but it isn’t too loud either, which is more than we can say for AMD HD 7970 GHz Edition’s reference cooler that’s already drawn enough criticism in this respect.

Thanks to the 50 MHz higher GPU clock than that of the regular HD 7970 GHz Edition, the royalAce card beats the GTX 680 in most games.

If you’re the kind that obsesses over the power bill, then HD 7970 GHz Edition probably isn’t your cup of tea since the cards consume significantly more than reference HD 7970s. Additionally, performance-per-Watt ratio on high end graphics cards is something where Nvidia takes the cake, at least when it comes to the last generation of graphics.

In conclusion, the HD 7970 royalAce is definitely a card that any gamer wouldn’t say no to. Ultimately, our decision is well backed by our testing and we’re looking at one of the fastest single GPU graphics cards on the market, with a factory overclock, special cooling and further overclocking headroom.

AMD has issues a press release saying that it has reached a new major milestone in the graphics industry with a worldwide availability of its entire HD 7000 series lineup in less than three months.

The new 28nm GCN based series kicked off with HD 7900 series in December, followed by the AMD Radeon HD 7700 series in February and rounded up with the availability of the Radeon HD 7800 series graphics cards. AMD was keen to note that its HD 7900 series was the first with support for PCI-Express 3.0.1 and that HD 7700 series was the first to break the 1GHz GPU clock barrier with the Radeon HD 7770 graphics card.

The good part of the story is that its latest Radeon HD 7800 series is finally going to show up on retail/e-tail shelves.

Currently you can buy at least three different HD 7870 cards on Newegg.com with a price set at US $359.99 and a couple of HD 7850 cards with a price tag set at US $259.99. The cards have also stared to appear in Europe as well and it is possible to find the HD 7870 for as low as €304,96, while the HD 7850 is listed at €225,79.

AMD has now rolled out its latest WHQL certified Catalyst driver pack, Catalyst 12.2 WHQL. The new Catalyst includes AMD display driver 8.95, Hydravision, Southbridge/IXP driver and AMD Catalyst Control Center/Vision Engine Control Center version 8.95 and supports all products since Radeon HD 2400 series.

Catalyst 12.2 enables support for Radeon HD 7900 and AMD Radeon HD 7700 series graphics card under Windows 7 and Vista 64-bit/32-bit OS, while Windows XP support is expected with AMD Catalyst 12.4 driver. The improvements list is pretty poor as well as it includes custom resolutions for AMD Eyefinity configs, Dynamic Configuration Changes for switching between different display configurations, Windows Task bar move and resize options with Hydravision and improved Profile Manager for multiple display profiles.

The resolved issues list includes random fixes under Windows 7 OS in game titles like COD: Modern Warfare 3, HAWX, Dragon Age 2, Battlefield - Bad Company 2, Starcraft 2, Batman Arkham City and Crysis Warhead.

In addition to the new Catalyst 12.2 WHQL driver, AMD also released a new 12.2 Catalyst Application Profiles CAP 1 that adds CrossfireX profiles and improvements for Mass Effect 3, Path of Exile, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, L.A Noire and some other titles.

You can find the new Catalyst 12.2 WHQL driver, 12.2 CAP 1 as well as the full release notes here.

Looking to get as much as it can from AMD's Radeon HD 7900 series, Powercolor has launched yet another HD 7970 graphics card, the Powercolor Radeon HD 7970 Dual Fan.

Despite having a dual-slot custom cooler, the new Powercolor HD 7970 Dual Fan still works at reference clocks, 925MHz for the GPU and 1375MHz (5.5GHz) for 3GB of GDDR5 memory paired up with a 384-bit memory interface. The main feature of this card is its dual-slot custom cooler that features two 92mm fans, unique SSU-shape heatpipe desing and should keep the card up 10 percent cooler and up to 15 percent quieter when compared to the reference card.

Unfortunately, the price or the availability date haven't been announced but we guess that it should hit retail/e-tail at somewhere around €500.

According to a post over NordicHardware, it looks like Nvidia isn't too impressed by AMD's Radeon HD 7900 series and it is quite confident that Kepler will have no trouble in seizing the performance. Once it shows up, of course.

Although no specific details were given, an Nvidia spokeperson noted that they expected more from AMD's new architecture and that Nvidia's 28nm Kepler GPUs will have no trouble in beating AMD performance-wise. Nvidia didn't specify the precise launch date and is still sticking to the "first half of 2012". Of course, despite such optimistic statements from the green camp, AMD is quite happy and is currently selling its HD 7970 and preparing to launch the rest of the lineup during next month.

Of course, performance isn't the only part of the story as usually the price has a lot to do with success, particularly with the economic concerns plaguing western markets. We are quite sure that AMD has enough maneuvering room there, so we can probably expect some price cuts, provided Nvidia lives up to its promises. However, until we see some actual numbers from Nvidia we must say that AMD is doing quite well, while Kepler is still nowhere to be seen.

According to our sources, the 22nd of December is the date for the Radeon HD 7900 series press event. This means that reviews will go up on 22nd of December and AMD will probably brag about being having the first 28nm desktop cards in 2011, while there will be no cards or partner annoucements until 9th of January 2012.

Some select members of the press have already gotten their hands on cards yesterday and some will get them today. All performance figures and estimates that came before yesterday are pretty much off the table since AMD did a good job in keeping the 12.1 RC driver offline until a day before yesterday. Some estimates that Tahiti is about 15 percent faster than Cayman are way off and simply unreal judging by the specs of the Tahiti GPU. Of course, there are some AMD slides that show performance of the new Tahiti, but history has taught us to rather stick to our sources about those or wait for some real benchmarks rather than to look at AMD official slides.

Currently, most of our sources are sticking to the same story, AMD partners are still bound to the 9th of January launch date and, although some might start to list the HD 7900 series cards, it is quite possible that they won't be available until that date. Of course, AMD can give a green light earlier but currently partners have the 9th of January 2012 as the launch date.

According to a post over at Donanimhaber, it appears that the upcoming Radeon HD 7900 series will feature a new Eyefinity 3D feature. Donanimhaber also talked about the pricing of the Radeon HD 7900 series and puts it at pretty much the same ballpark that we reported a few weeks ago.

According to Donanimhaber, the upcoming AMD Radeon HD 7900 series, and probably the entire Southern Islands based cards, will have a new feature called Eyefinity 3D. The new Eyefinity 3D is pretty much the regular Eyefinity with support for 3D 120Hz displays.

The rumoured price is set at somewhere around €500 for the HD 7970. We have been hearing that the final price should be set at US $549 for the HD 7970 and US $449 for the slower HD 7950 for quite some time and it looks like our sources were right on track when we reported it a few weeks back.

Of course, AMD can easily change the pricing a day before the launch so nothing is 100 percent sure until cards start showing up in retail/e-tail.